Close-Up

The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, whose images have appeared in W, makes naturalistic portraits and videos of those whose lives are in transition: young adults (like Amy, left, shot in 2008), soldiers, new mothers. The subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum (June 29 through October 3), Dijkstra uses a 4×5 field camera, in part, she says, because its slow, cumbersome operation creates “a space where things can happen. The people I shoot really have to open themselves up to me. And I have to open up, too. It’s an interaction.” At times, the relationship can take years, even decades, to develop: One subject, now a 20-­something mother, has appeared before Dijkstra’s lens regularly since she was 6. “We always start somewhere,” Dijkstra says. “But we never know exactly where it will end up.”